THE JOY OF READINGTHE JOY OF READING

M. HARIKUMARM. HARIKUMAR

25 DEC 201125 DEC 2011

READING IS THE MOST SOLITARY ,

CONTEMPLATIVE AND LONG LASTING OF

ALL THE AESTHETIC PLEASURES

• A Complex (?) definition

• Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols to construct or derive meaning. It is a means of language acquisition, communication and sharing information and ideas

“ Every (wo)man who knows how to read has it in his/her power to magnify him/herself, to multiply the ways in which (s)he exists, to make his/her life full, significant and interesting”

Aldus Huxley

“.......it consoles, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wider kind. It is a moral illumination”

Reading is a fine art

In order to be better at anything – reading, writing, tennis, chess , public speaking - is to practice. The more you read ,the smarter you are. The more words you are exposed to, the more of language you see and have experience with , the better you are able to express and write

Gifts of readingReduces stress

Greater tranquility

Increases analytical thinking

Improves memory

Improves writing skills

Talk intelligently

We make time for what is important to us

Sources: Where to find books/magazines ?

From Library to Cybrary

E- book ( Kindle – Amazon. COM)

Flip kart

And of course – bookshops

Amazon.com

How to find good books? How to find good books?

ReviewsReviews (Don’t believe all of them )(Don’t believe all of them )

FriendsFriends

ReferencesReferences

Skimming & scanning in Libraries / Lending Skimming & scanning in Libraries / Lending LibrariesLibraries

Book shopsBook shops

HH

A Private Library - Antilibrary

Umberto Eco belongs the small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful and non-dull. He is the owner of a large personal library more than 30,000 books

A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool

“You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older. The more you know the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books as “antilibrary”

Reading skills:

Scanning :

a useful first step before reading more deeply

Skimming:

handy when you are looking for particular things in a text

FAST READINGFAST READING

Rich Vocabulary is a must

Eye motion : See blocks words instead of a single word

( Former US Prez John Kennedy had a very high reading speed)

Regression: unnecessary re-reading

Concentration

Environment

Engineers are in general not good readers is a fact. Their knowledge on non technical subjects tends to near zero.

Why?

So far I am yet to find a definite answer

( The only exception I know is Anand the famous Malayalam novelist /short story writer, a product of CET )

• What to read?

• “Any written material” is the answer

• From Plato to Playboy

Film songs

Innle neeyouru sundara ragamayen ponnodakkuzhalil vannolichu……….

P. Bhaskaran

ComicsComics

• Phantom Lee Folk

• Asterix

• Bobanum Molliym

• Cartoons of Gopikrishnan

PoetryHow to start reading and enjoying poetry?

Vallattholl

Browning

Of course don’t forget dictionaries

Advanced learner’s Dictionary - School level

Longman’ Active English

Collins Co-build

Mac Millan’s book of Phrases

Longman’s Activator Dictionary

• Phrases

• “Carry coals to Newcastle”

• Achilles Heel

• “Stay put” - If you stay put you remain in a place, job etc and do not try to move from it

American dictionariesWebsterRandom House

Thesaurus

Modern English usage Michael Swan

“Origin of words”

“How to build Vocabulary” series

English news papers

Editorials, Central page article, Opp. Ed page

Prasannarajan

Rajakrishnan

M P Narayana Pillai

Prof M. Krishnan Nair

• Time,

• Economist,

Magazines

• Time Essay, Cover story

History

ToynbeeSecond world warThird Reich, Auschwitz, StalingradNuremberg

Jawaharlal Nehru

Autobiographies

My experiments with truthThe Report to Greco, WordsKannirum Kinavum

Classics

Upanishads

RamayanaMahabharataThirukuralIliad Odysseus

Les MiserablesCrime and PunishmentJean Christofe

Short stories

The fate of a man : SolokovBest 10 short stories in Malayalam

NovelsGarcia Marcus, Kazantzakis

Sartre, Camus, Kafka

Arogyaniketanam, YayatiSundarikalum sundaranmarum

The inimitable BasheerM T Vasudevan Nair,AnandO V Vijayan

Non fiction

Future Shock and other books – Alvin Toffler

The end of history and the last man

The Clash of Civilization

The world is flat

The Lexus and the Olive tree

HumorCatch -22 ...

MAD (now Extinct) Cartoon magazine

Thrillers and Pulp fiction

Sydney Sheldon,Jeffrey ArcherFrederick Forsyth, Chetan Bhagat

And the immortal Sherlock Homes series

Dramas

Ibsen

Ionesco

Camus

Tennessee Williams

Pirandello

C J Thomas

• Science fiction– Arthur Clarke– “ 2001 ASPACE ODYSSEY”– Isac Asimov

Popular Science

Carl Sagan

Paul Davies

“ A brief history of nearly every thing “ by Bill Bryson

“The Ascent of man”

And finally your subject - ENGINEERING

Example “Digital Communication”

Read at least three of four books on the same Subject. Note how different authors approach the same topic. It gives you a better insight. And Read half a dozen papers also on selective topicsSay “spread spectrum”

• And Certain things are to be seen working

• before you can effectively introduce those subjects in the class - examples

• Gyroscope

• SNMP

Quotations

“The London bridge is falling down...falling down...falling down...”

a nursery rhyme

This forms one line in the famous poem “The waste Land” by T S Eliot showing the degradation of culture

The famous Beginnings.....

It was love at first sight” Joseph Heller Catch -22

“It was best of the times.... “ Dickens

“ Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” ... GarciaMarquez

• Call me Ishamel” Moby Dick by Herman Melville

• “Mother died today. Or may be yesterday; I don’tknow...” Camus

Jot down sentences and ideas you like from what you read

“ In my younger days I wanted to play cricket badly. Finally I got an opportunity to play and I did it. I played badly”

Shashi Tharoor

“If omnipresence is a sign of divinity, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi qualifies for it”

Time Magazine review of the movie

“The making of a mahatma”

“...Some created history by arriving at the scene like MahatmaGandhi from South Africa, Lenin in a train to Finland station; some created history by refusing to leave the scene like Rosa Parks from a Montgomery city bus in the state of Alabama”

Time Millennium issue

“All cities are monuments: Tokyo symbolizes the victory of the new over the old; Lisbon the legacy of exploration; Calcutta a tribute to colonialism and Rome man’s most poignant footstone to war.......”

• Time Magazine

“We fought a military war; our opponents a political one; we sought physical attrition; our opponents psychological extinction ; In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla warfare: The guerrilla wins if he does not lose; a conventional army loses if it does not win...”

Henry Kissinger

Churchill’s prophetic words:

Guess about who?

“rogues, rascals and free booters...... “

Vaclav Havel :

Czech Independence day – from Presidential speech

“ My dear fellow citizens , for 40 years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme; how our country was flourishing, how many millions of steel we produced, how happy we were all ,how we trusted our government and what bright prospects were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for the office so that I too would lie to you. Our country is not flourishing... The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated environment; we feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.....”

During the sixty plus years of my existence(?), I came across bureaucracy , bad , worst , cruel and many times , - inhuman and criminal

It may be so for so many others

Why?

• “When you have disciplined people you don’t need hierarchy; When you have disciplined thought you don’t need bureaucracy . When you have disciplined action you don’t need excessive control. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic entrepreneurship you get the magic alchemy of great performance...”

• An Utopia??????

I hope the following para will help you think of I hope the following para will help you think of an answer ( Jim Collins in Good to Great)an answer ( Jim Collins in Good to Great)

Thank You